On November 23, a researcher from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Marjolein Helder, presented her Ph.D. research on a method to generate clean, renewable electricity from natural interactions between the soil and growing plants.

Plants produce such enormous quantities of organic material from photosynthesis that they actually excrete 70 percent of it, unused, into the soil by their roots. This provides important nutrients for bacteria and other soil organisms. When bacteria metabolize this organic matter, they release electrons into the soil. The premise of the Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell is that electrodes placed close to the roots of plants can absorb these electrons and use them to generate electricity, much like a battery.

Helder's tests indicate that the Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell can generate 0.4 W of electricity per square meter of vegetated area, more than biomass fermentation is currently capable of. Through further refinement of the technique, Helder predicts that its power generating capacity could rise as high as 3.2 W per square meter. This level of power generation would enable the average household to be supplied entirely from the power generated by grass planted on a 100 square-meter roof.

This sounds like a really, really cool way to produce electricity.

Now, I don't actually expect this to ever be commercialized. No other new/sane energy source has ever been made available, so it's pretty safe to assume this won't be. (These things go back over 100 years.)

But, can you imagine powering your computer with tomato plants? Or recharging your phone from growing herbs? Or curing your cancer with marijuana oil and powering your TV and household lights at the same time?

It's all *just* out of reach...

Some names worth looking into for "free" energy:

Tom Bearden

John Hutchison

Judy Wood (Avoid looking into this woman if you like your world view as it is - very scary)

John Bedini

Howard Johnson

Fred Bell

Nikola Tesla

James Clerk Maxwell

More out there. That's a quick list and by no means complete.

If anyone knows anything else worth looking into, please post it.

I've been looking into energy for a while, and still looking to learn more.

Destroy your world view here...

2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't work quite right. It relies on flat space-time, but space-time is curved. Info from:

Using plants to produce electricity is indeed very cool, but sadly quite inefficient. Those crazy plants are green! (reflecting green-ish photons). Compare the chlorophyll absorption spectrum ( http://www.firstrays...plants_and_light.htm ) with the sun emission spectrum ( http://www.soultek.c...echnology-735670.jpg ) and you'll see that plants suck at converting sun's light to usable energy, they are less efficient than current photovoltaic panels. If you count in fact that you cannot take away all the energy the plants produce and you must somehow build the infrastructure to gather the energy, the picture is grim.

Maybe in a couple of decades, after humankind has mastered genetic engineering, we'll see some kind of black plants that will grow batteries. Maybe they will grow on Earth orbit and just drop the batteries with tiny parachutes on our heads ;-).

Didn't they get the efficiency of photovoltaic cells up like 20% after having been a mere 12% for decades?

I was talking to university professor who was demonstrating some of the new cells with a home energy controller and we got to talking about that.

He actually agreed with me on the idea that since the bane of solar cells is that they get hot, it would make sense to coat the underside of the cells with thermocouples and then mount that on a circulating water jacket to create a temperature difference.

The result of such a system would be that the heat difference between the cells and the jacket would cause the thermocouples to create additional electricity, increasing recovery efficiency so long as the jacket circulating pump did not consume more power than the thermocouples produced. Cooler running solar cells would also produce more power anyway, their efficiency would stay higher.

I do like the plant approach though, it certainly is unusual. But in terms of energy output per square meter of sunlit surface, how does it compare to traditional methods like Ethanol- factoring in conversion losses going from biomass to ethanol to thermal to electrical as done in conventional systems.

I'm not so sure that a direct approach to plant efficiency is the best one. After all, even if you get less electrical output from plants, you can still eat them! So, as Ricky would say, you can get 2 birds stoned!

As for genetic engineering...

I'm pretty much dead set against it at this point. So far it has only produced pain and misery. Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean you *should* do something. Until there is some kind of sanity, accountability, responsibility, and actual moral conduct in the scientific world, genetic engineering will only continue to bring on misery and destruction.

This will never happen. The current system is fixed by design to work towards greater and greater evil. Doing good inside the current system is not possible. You cannot have a system that is designed to create conflict of interest actually work towards good. It doesn't work.

Cripes... we have a system where the patent holders sit on the committees to approve of things as safe, etc. etc. Broke. GE cannot be trusted in this environment.

There is some good coming out of GE, however, it's kind of like some guy giving you a handful of gold (a good thing), then when you peer behind him, you see piles of corpses and smashed teeth.

So I'm pretty much closed to hearing about the 1 good thing GE brings amidst the mountain of evil.

And, I've simply read too much on the topic. The process itself is technically (i.e. intrinsically) destructive, not to mention the problems of cross-contamination, patents, etc. If Satan were a scientist, he'd be a genetic engineer.

I've been looking into solar power a bit, and from what I can tell, it all boils down to cost per output weighed against that cost per square meter.

The plant energy in the article above is pretty interesting as you're getting energy from the plants that they naturally give off, so wherever you have plants, you have energy. That could be a lawn, a farm, or whatever. Basically, you're just harvesting energy.

THAT seems like pretty exciting stuff!

Still, I like the Bearden/Bedini stuff best. Still reading there though... there's a lot of math and physics that I don't know and have to learn. e.g. Hamiltonian quaternions (Deozaan had mentioned this math in a post about 3D gaming a while back - it's pretty wild stuff).